Isaac's Army

by Matthew Brzezinski

  In one such wild area, in a dark and damp cellar near the Wilfried Hoffman Works, where twelve hundred Jewish tailors sewed SS uniforms, Zivia Lubetkin and Isaac Zuckerman tried to regroup the remnants of the decimated Jewish Fighting Organization. A single candle lit the room, and several dozen ZOB members sat around a sparse meal prepared from canned goods scoured from neighboring tenements. Food was no longer an issue now that the Ghetto was mostly empty and the “legals” were fed by their Nazi employers. Almost anything could be foraged at night from the tens of thousands of vacant apartments and later traded on the Aryan side for fresh produce. Still, Zivia and Isaac ate without appetite. “We were consumed with shame,” she recalled. “How could we live when we had watched hundreds of thousands of Jews taken to slaughter?”

  The question tormented the young Zionists, now that the immediate danger of death was over. During the deportations, no one had had the time or the luxury to reflect. Escaping the daily roundups had been all-consuming. Now there was no escaping from the full horror of the calamity. The toll was staggering in every demographic. Of 51,458 Jewish children under the age of ten in Warsaw, for instance, only 498 remained alive. Ninety-eight percent of all teenage girls had been sent to Treblinka, as had an only slightly less devastating 89.5 percent of males in their twenties. The genocide spanned all age brackets, occupations, and political orientations. Statistically, only the various underground organizations had fared better than the general population, losing around half to two-thirds of their members, thanks to their clandestine experience.

  Ironically, this heightened survival rate now filled many with guilt. “We hid like mice in holes,” Isaac Zuckerman lamented. “That was our shame and our disgrace.” As he looked around the cellar at the hunched figures of newly orphaned teenagers, of fellow Resistance members whose brothers and sisters were dead, the same thought ran through everyone’s mind: Why hadn’t they risen up? Why hadn’t they picked up a stick, a knife, a stone, and flung themselves on the Germans, as Joseph Kaplan had valiantly done? Kaplan and Samuel Braslaw had died heroically. In the furtive glances directed at Ari Wilner, the blond and blue-eyed courier who was now the ranking Young Guardsman in the ZOB, the unspoken question appeared to be whether they should do the same.

  “What now?” someone broke the gloomy silence. “I don’t remember who spoke first, Zivia or Ari,” Zuckerman said. “The words were bitter, heavy, determined: There would be no Jewish resistance. We were too late. The people were destroyed.”

  It was pointless to continue, the speaker said. “When there were hundreds of thousands of Jews in Warsaw we couldn’t organize a Jewish fighting force. How will we succeed now, when only tens of thousands are left? We didn’t win the trust of the masses. We have no weapons and we almost certainly won’t have any. There’s no strength to start all over again. Honor is trampled.”

  Murmurs of assent and looks of shame followed the statement. It was true, someone declared. They had failed. The situation seemed utterly hopeless until one of the younger ZOB members spoke up. They should go out in a blaze of redemptive glory, he suggested, using the one weapon they still had: hundreds of gallons of gasoline stored in canisters throughout the basements of abandoned buildings. “Come on,” exhorted the youth. “Let’s go out in the streets tomorrow, burn down the Ghetto and attack the Germans. We’ll be liquidated. We are sentenced to be liquidated anyway. But honor will be saved.”

  That suicidal outburst changed the tone of the conversation. Zuckerman would later call it one of the ZOB’s seminal moments. The proposal unleashed a torrent of pent-up anger. In one instant, the gloom lifted. Everyone started talking at once. Plans for kamikaze-style attacks were presented and shot down. Fierce arguments broke out over how best to die.

  In the end, with great effort, Isaac managed to quash the notion of a collective suicide mission. Instead, he argued, they needed to rebuild the organization, find more guns, and replenish their decimated ranks. “Ari must go back to the Aryan side. We must look for new contacts,” Isaac declared. “We shall raise money in the Ghetto and buy weapons from private dealers.” They would build bunkers and shelters and rent safe houses on the Aryan side. And they would wage war on informants, Gestapo agents, and the remnants of the Jewish Police, all but four hundred of whom had been deported. “We started organizing again,” Zuckerman recalled of the turning point. “Forty-eight hours later, Mordechai Anielewicz entered the Ghetto.”

  If there was ever a time when young Jews in Warsaw needed a bold and decisive leader, it was in the sorrowful, soul-searching days after the Gross Aktion.

  For all his charisma, his legendary sense of humor and politician’s gift for speech making, Isaac Zuckerman was not necessarily that leader. Isaac lacked the all-consuming fire, the inner drive and self-discipline, the unwavering self-confidence necessary to inspire blind obedience. Zivia Lubetkin did possess that single-minded focus and intensity, but she was not an extrovert; she was too distant and emotionally detached, and she shied away from the spotlight. Her romance with Isaac—the two had now been open about their affair for some time—also decreased her ability to lead, particularly in the eyes of the Young Guardsmen, who may not have been aware of her lengthy independent history as a professional Dror activist.

  What really killed Isaac and Zivia’s leadership chances, however, was their presence and relative passivity during the deportations. Mordechai Anielewicz, on the other hand, was not tainted by this stigma. He had left Warsaw in disgust earlier that year, because no one would heed his calls for an immediate revolt. The twenty-three-year-old Young Guard leader had been dismissed, even within his own relatively militant organization, as a dangerous hothead. Party elders had cringed when he arrived from Vilna in late 1941 waving a gun around, warning anyone who would listen that they would all die unless they rose up. At the time, such talk was viewed as dangerous fearmongering and Anielewicz was written off as a hysterical troublemaker. The teenagers—the seventeen- and eighteen-year-olds who made up the bulk of the Young Guard—loved him. But his superiors in the Po’alei Zion Left saw him more as a powder keg: unstable, and above all hard to handle. When Anielewicz furiously stormed out of the Ghetto swearing to search for less docile Jews elsewhere in Poland, relief had swept over some who worried that his actions would only serve to attract the Gestapo’s wrath.

  Effectively, Mordechai had been sent packing, a loose cannon who no one was ready to believe. Now, returning from Silesian exile, untainted by the expulsions that discredited his critics, he was welcomed back as a prescient sage, a warrior in waiting, and one that young Zionists were desperate to follow.

  For Anielewicz, the vindication was also a homecoming. He was a Varsovian, born and raised in the shantytown section of Riverside, which had been known before the war as one of the roughest slums in the Polish capital, if not in all of Poland. Riverside clung to the muddy western banks of the flood-prone Vistula; most of its flimsy wooden structures felt temporary, since the low-lying area regularly washed out. Warsaw, unlike Prague or Budapest, which hugged its riverbanks, had shunned its temperamental waterway, opting to build at a safe distance on elevated ground. Riverside had been sacrificed to the elements and left to smugglers, gangsters, and illicit distillers—a shady place where mud, squalor, and filthy outhouses were the norm. “Jews considered it the underworld suburb,” Simha Ratheiser recalled. His grandmother had owned a tavern there. “Drunkards haggling and quarreling were an everyday sight,” he remembered. “The ambulance visited the tavern frequently. So did the police.”

  It was in Riverside, among almshouses, homeless shelters, and convents catering to unwed mothers, that Mordechai Anielewicz acquired his Marxist yearnings for social justice. He initially was drawn to Betar’s brand of muscular Judaism, its paramilitary camps, discipline, and combative atmosphere. But Betar proved too bourgeois. Mordechai crossed over from the far Zionist right to the far left while in his midteens, perhaps because his humble roots did not mesh with the more prosperous backgr
ounds of many conservative Zionists.

  The Anielewicz family lived on Solec Street, where some of the buildings were derelict grain silos and salt depots converted into crowded dwellings. Mostly Gentiles resided in the rickety structures, though property registers indicated that the Rozenwein and Bromberg families had small shops down the street, near the massive concrete footings of the Poniatowski Bridge, under which an unlicensed open-air market operated.

  Anielewicz’s father, Abraham, owned a small convenience store, and like every other business owner in Riverside, he had to pay tribute to racketeers. Mordechai’s mother had a stall that sold fish, and she could not always afford to buy ice to keep the fish from spoiling in the summer heat. The Anielewiczes were poor, but not penniless. Mordechai and his younger brother Pinchas, a brawny wrestling champion, mostly ate potatoes and cabbage, but they had meat at least once a week—and there was always fish. Their clothes were threadbare and unfashionable but clean and neatly pressed. Despite their difficult financial situation, the family managed to send Mordechai to Laor, one of the best private Jewish schools in Warsaw. Laor was on Cordials Street in the Jewish district, which required Mordechai to take the P or Z bus lines, and he often fought off local Gentile bullies—sheygetzes—who tried to steal his thirty-groszy, or nickel, fare. He graduated at the top of his class, mastering Hebrew in the process, and he picked up his future nom de guerre, Aniolek, or Little Angel in Polish, while still in high school. It was a play off his surname and deceptively angelic face—for Anielewicz was as boyishly handsome as Simha Ratheiser, with delicate features and searching green eyes that masked an explosive temper. His Christian neighbors gave him another nickname, which paid tribute to that temper and his quick fists: Mordek, roughly translated as Little Thugface, a diminutive of Mordechai that by Riverside’s rough-and-tumble standards was actually a term of endearment.

  Shortly after Anielewicz’s return, the ZOB received another piece of welcome news. The Bund wanted to talk. It had little choice by this point. Within its discontented lower ranks a mutiny was brewing. The generational divide that had been building for over a year between impatient younger members and their more risk-averse superiors finally erupted into full-blown revolt after the deportations, as many junior Bundists blamed their bosses for idly standing by while the Nazis emptied the Ghetto.

  That the Bund, like the Zionists, had saved a disproportionate number of its own operatives from the gas chambers only heightened the group’s collective sense of anger and guilt. “That didn’t fill me with pride,” Boruch Spiegel said of being among the living. “I didn’t think I deserved to live.” Not when his father had starved to death in front of his eyes. Not when he had watched his mother and sisters dragged down Zamenhof to the Umschlagplatz, where they were crammed into cattle cars so overcrowded that people regularly suffocated before the trains even left Warsaw. Not when Berl, his idol and inspiration, had disappeared without a trace. Boruch couldn’t bring himself to imagine what had happened to them once they reached Treblinka: the final humiliation of forced nudity, the sinking horror of the concrete showers, the hiss of searing gas, the scrape of the bulldozers plowing pale limbs into the black earth.

  So when the Bund arranged for him to be given a job at a German plant, he wasn’t grateful. He was ashamed. He didn’t care that people were paying the equivalent of thousands of dollars in bribes to buy the precious work permits, or that those with means went to astonishing lengths to secure spots at the miserable factories for their loved ones. “It wasn’t important to me that I was alive.” In Boruch’s shop, many others felt similarly unworthy. “Father, mother, sister all burned, my Zille in Majdanek, my only child in a Catholic convent,” cried Zalman Friedrich, the blond Bund courier who been sent to uncover the truth about Treblinka. “All I want now is to be consumed in the battle for revenge.”

  The self-loathing rage that welled from survivor’s guilt quickly morphed into resentment toward Bund leaders like Maurice Orzech. Orzech had downplayed the threat of extermination. He had refused to join the Jewish Fighting Organization. He and other leaders like Bernard Goldstein, had advocated calm and caution when urgent action was needed. “They had misjudged the situation very badly,” Spiegel reflected.

  The criticism was not unfounded, but also not entirely fair. Bund bosses had worked tirelessly to prevent their ranks from being thinned by the deportations. They had successfully used their trade union connections to shelter hundreds of Bundists in the burgeoning slave labor mills. As a result, new industrial enclaves like the Brushmakers District, which flanked Krasinski Park in the easternmost quadrant of the Ghetto, had become Bund strongholds. The factory where Boruch Spiegel worked, in the main shops district on the western end of the Ghetto, also had a large contingent of Bundists. The plant belonged to a Nazi entrepreneur named Kurt Roerich, who made leather accessories for the Wehrmacht: belts, holsters, stirrups. With only five hundred employees it was one of the smaller shops, tiny compared to the sprawling operations of the Schultz brothers next door or the two giant Toebbens factories, which had a combined twelve thousand workers and supplied 60 percent of the winter clothing worn by German soldiers on the Eastern Front.

  Boruch’s girlfriend, Chaika Belchatowska, was also at Roerich, and the pair had grown even closer since the deportations. “She was all I had left,” he felt. Chaika worked on the line while Spiegel was a janitor, charged with sweeping the factory floor. Their shifts were twelve hours, seven days a week, and they lived together in a neighboring tenement designated for Roerich employees. Every morning between six and seven o’clock they joined the throngs of other slave laborers making their way to the shops. This, and the six-to-seven-o’clock return trip each evening, were the new Ghetto rush hours, the only times Jews were allowed on the streets of the cordoned-off industrial enclaves. Anyone moving about during off-hours was shot.

  Despite the best efforts of Bund bosses, dissent and dissatisfaction spread in the crowded shops. To young Bundists like Boruch and Chaika, the ideological gulf that divided the Bund and the Zionists seemed like a wasteful distraction. Rightly or wrongly, the collective anger focused on Orzech. He was effectively deposed by being quietly exiled to a safe house on the Aryan side, where he would be out of harm’s way and no longer able to issue orders. The old guard no longer commanded the respect of the rank and file. Even the grizzled special ops chief Bernard Goldstein, the Bund’s resident warrior and its biggest hero before the war, was being pensioned off. “Bernard didn’t grasp the reality of the conditions in the Ghetto,” Mark Edelman noted regretfully.

  Edelman—now twenty-two, but aged beyond his years by his experience at the Umschlagplatz—was one of the leaders of the palace coup against party elders. “As usual Mark was carelessly dressed,” Goldstein bitterly recalled of the day in early October 1942 when Edelman, his former errand boy, escorted him out of the Ghetto and into forced retirement in a safe house. “Neatness never seemed important to him. Life had made him outwardly unsentimental and hard, but behind that close-mouthed grimness were keen intelligence and warm generosity. And he was utterly without fear. He led me by the arm. A year or two before, this same Mark had escorted me through the Ghetto to many illegal meetings. He would walk behind at a distance of ten or fifteen paces without taking his eyes from me for a moment. Then he would stand patiently in the street outside the building, guarding the meeting place. Today he led me by the arm. We were so much closer now than we had been then, but how far, far apart we would soon be. My feet protested every step.”

  When the baton passed to the young, the old ideological barriers to unification were quickly thrown aside. Within a week of Goldstein’s forced retirement, the final hurdle to the creation of a unified Jewish front fell. On October 15, the Bund formally joined the Jewish Fighting Organization. It had taken three years and the death of nearly four hundred thousand people, but the Jewish Resistance finally was largely unified. Mark Edelman and Boruch Spiegel, Isaac Zuckerman and Zivia Lubetkin were now on th
e same team, fighting for the same cause in the same ranks. Organizationally, it was a seminal moment. Edelman, befitting his heightened status, was delegated to the organization’s new five-man command staff, to serve alongside Isaac and Mordechai Anielewicz. He did not know Isaac well, and he knew next to nothing about Anielewicz. But he took an immediate shine to Zuckerman, who was a few years older and a full head taller. “We saw eye to eye,” Mark recalled wryly of the man who would become his closest friend. Isaac reciprocated the warm sentiments. The thin, mustachioed Bundist possessed a no-nonsense dignity, a serene “nobility,” that appealed to Zuckerman.

  The Jewish Fighting Organization had taken its first step toward becoming the supreme authority in the Warsaw Ghetto. In short order, its ranks were expanded to include the parent groups of Dror and the Young Guard, Po’alei Zion and Po’alei Zion Left, Communists from the Polish Workers Party, and the Gordinia and Akiva youth arms of the centrist General Zionists. Only the religious Agudas Israel party refused to join, its Orthodox leaders preferring to trust their fate to God, while the Revisionist Zionists, who had their own well-established paramilitary arm in the Jewish Military Union, were never asked. “They were subordinate to fringe [Polish] ultranationalists that we could never trust,” Edelman said of the JMU’s Gentile patrons. The ideological gulf had narrowed enough for the left and center to unite, but the leap to the far right was still too daunting.

  Even within the ZOB, trust between new and old members was a major issue. “Stupidities and petty arguments” plagued early meetings, according to Edelman and Zuckerman. Mutual suspicion ran sufficiently high that the Polish Workers Party felt compelled to cable their handlers in Moscow to complain that the Bund “sharply opposed us and was especially virulent against the Soviet Union.”